Valve has a certain fondness for filling in the backstory over time in comic book form for their more popular games. Earlier this year, they released a Team Fortress 2 comic called The Administrator” that gave the vibrant in-game universe of their team-based multiplayer shooter some filling out, and now they are doing the same for Left 4 Dead.

The new Left 4 Dead comic, called “The Sacrifice,” uses the characters and locales of the first game to fill in some brush strokes on the inter-character dynamics of our plucky zombie fighters, as well as some hints at how the plague started and what is being done by the government to suppress it.

It’s an interesting experiment, but like “The Administrator,” I find the comic more jarring than canonical. Where “The AAdministrator” tried to layer some in-universe justification on top of the inherently abstract (and quite surreal) gameplay of Team Fortress 2, “The Sacrifice” fails for me by defying my expectations of Left 4 Dead’s survivor group. In the game, I always felt that they were survivors crushed together by fate, doing the best they could to fight through the zombie hordes to rescue. In “The Sacrifice,” though, they seem too hardened, not enough like frightened survivors and too much like action-movie cliches.

Nevertheless, it’s a fun read, and if you like Left 4 Dead‘s gameplay, you’ll surely appreciate an afternoon dose of zombie massacring in paneled form.